Some definitions.

The worst thing is when the cute barista you've been making eyes at gets off work and leaves.

The second worst thing is when the nice person you met shakes your hand really hard and smooshes your knuckles against your torrey ring.

The third worst thing is when the girl in the nice green jacket at whom who you started making eyes once the cute barista got off work also decides to leave.

The fourth worst thing is when you ask another barista (who is pretty cute, but at whom you haven't been making eyes of any kind) to tell you in all honesty, as a human being, whether the coffee shop's snickerdoodles are any good, and she says "yeah, they're gooey" and then the snickerdoodles turn out to be mediocre and salty.

The fifth worst thing is when you burn your tongue on your scalding drink.

Ooh. The sixth worst thing is when, out of force of habit, you look to where the girl in the green jacket was sitting, and find a scruffy-looking middle aged man sitting there instead.

A funny thing is when you are scanning the coffee shop to see if there might be anything to qualify as a seventh worst thing, but being repeatedly met with things you actually consider generally good, nice things, such as:

when all the chess pieces on the chess board are mixed up and shoved to the side of the chess-board-table because somebody was penning a hand-written letter there;

when there are really nice, almost beautiful, wooden chairs strewn about;

when there's a little boy drinking out of a paper cup with both hands while talking to an old man.

Another funny thing is when you start scanning the coffee shop for good, nice things, and end up only finding things that strike you as generally okay, unmentionable, and quotidian, such as:

the greenish/yellowish/tannish color of the walls;

the slightly irritating yet negligible grammatical/conceptual sloppiness of defining nouns (such as "the worst thing") with a definiens of the basic structure "is when x."

the small talk between customers and baristas.

Another nice thing: when the barista calls out "David, coffee at the bar!" and everybody in line discreetly scans the room to discover who this "David" could be.

Name-calling.

Louis and Lindsey, from time to time, bat around names for their upcoming baby.

Some favorite boy-names of mine that they have begun to seriously consider:
Eli
Archer
Solomon
Soren
Jar-Jar

But before they rush to name their soon-to-be offspring anything, they should consider the impact it might have on his/her criminal record.

Apparently, there is a direct correlation between "unpopular" names and criminal activity in adolescents.

Although, this shouldn't be a huge surprise. Father Walter Shandy has already introduced us all to the character-forming importance names carry. I was going to quote all of Chapter 19 of Volume 1 of Tristram Shandy here, in which Father Shandy expresses his views on the formative impact of names, but then I thought better of it, realizing it would take up precious "real estate" on my blog. Also, I'm fairly confident that no one would read it. Luckily, however, I found the chapter posted in full on this strange blog. Go read it.

After all, reading for pleasure is directly correlated to one's capacity for critical thought and one's capacity for hooking attractive women (don't believe me?).

Moral of the story:
Louis and Lindsey, read to your baby and don't name it E(a)rnest, Dmitri (why have I never seen The Brother's Karamazov starring Yul Brynner as Dmitri and William Shatner as Alyosha????), or Max.

Catering to a niche market:

Just looking around, I found this bad boy.



Pretty clever. And of course far better than, say, getting this tattoo:

Shoot the Piano Player.

Today I have verbalized a long held personal maxim:
Piano playing is enjoyable to the player and annoying to the audience, except when the playing is very good, in which case it is enjoyable to the audience. (I cannot speak to what it is like for the player in this case.)

My hands struggle to play Vince Guaraldi with a coordination befitting a three-legged race.
I plunk out Joplin as if in an awkward rage at my ectrodactyly.
I struggle to play Chopin's Nocturnes with the prowess and grace of a drunkard attempting to seduce a powerful woman.

But it's fun.

I think Francois Truffaut directed a movie once called "Shoot the Piano Player", the title of which alone offers up catharsis to any subjected to the musical flounderings of others. I forget what this movie entailed. Naked women, no doubt.

As a guitar player I have even less skill, but am a better performer. I think it's my awareness of my own ineptitude that suffuses my playing with whatever charm it has to boast. Like Harpo at the piano. He knows how lousy he is, and he is a raucous pleasure to watch (because of it?).

I wrote all the above about 3 weeks ago. I now believe maybe 20% of it (an undivided 20% of the whole. It's not that there is some subsection, or "chapter", or "lexia", or "pericope", that I wholly believe, while I wholly disbelieve the rest. Rather, I believe the whole thing, each part, at around 20%. Maybe 30% if I squint and force the blood to go to my brain.).

For and Of Daniel.

Here is a picture I took during a lightningstorm (I wonder if this is Blitzstrom in German. I hope so. It's such a nice-looking word) in Coeur d'Alene last summer. Daniel and I went out to watch the lightning, which was striking regularly several times a minute. Truly an astonishing sight.



I miss you, Daniel.

I miss your sense of humor.

Have you heard of the band/artist M.Craft? Do you like them/him?

Where I live and how I do it.

Here follow pictures from Idaho, including pictures of my recently acquired apartment. You can find more on facebook.

Here is the alcove area in my apartment.  There are five windows that look out onto 10th & Sherman, and the large lawn that my building (McCarty place) has.

My old tennis racket isn't getting a lot of action nowadays, so it'll have to be decor for now.  Soon, hopefully snow will melt and I'll get Louis to go to the court at the local college with me.  Also, the rug at the doorstep is not mine, nor are the curtains, in case your thoughts were cascading into judgment.

Behold my living room, and most of my books.  I have organized them according to genre and within each genre alphabetically.  I usually don't organize my books in this way because I tend not to think that the benefit will outweigh the work, but dividing and subdividing my personal library has already proved, if nothing else, mentally ordering.  I was reading S/Z by Roland Barthes (which is almost incomprehensible to me) in which he claims that literary theory cannot exist without typology.  You can actually spot S/Z in this picture.  It is a yellow book.

Another shot of the alcove.  I call it the alcove.  I will most definitely be buying more colorful/less floral/lacey curtains.

This is the dining room.  Notice the neat pattern the floorboards make.

What should I hang on this hooky-thing to the left?  Louis thinks I should hide pot in the little door there on the left wall, and then push the oven over to cover the door.

I love my breadbox.  And the coffee-shelf I have there.  Very happy.  If I can, I'd like to put up wallpaper or color the walls in the kitchen.  It's a little too painful fluorescent light + white walls for me.  Too sterile.

Bathroom is very pink.  I'm okay with this for now, but will probably try to change it.  Notice how I've decided to use Max's pencil holder birthday present!

My bedroom and my bed/floor.

The view from my room, through the dining room, to the alcove.

The opposite view, from the alcove, through the dining room, to the bedroom.  The stand-up heaters don't work (or I just don't how to make them work) but the wall heater to the right does work (faintly).

A view of McCarty place from the street.  The windows there on the first floor are my alcove.

My apartment windows, and the nice gazebo-thingy in the lawn of my building.

McCarty place used to be an old mansion, and then it was bought by the now-owner, who renovated it and transformed it into 7 different apartment units.  It really is nice, and I am very happy to be living here.

A shot of St. Thomas' catholic church from the intersection of 10th & Coeur d'Alene.  St. Thomas is without doubt the tallest church in CdA.  This is where I would go to Mass daily over the summer.  I still haven't gone back yet, but would like to.  Today I went to the Lutheran church on 5th & Reid, which is a great building, but offered a slightly confused service.  It's as if they couldn't decide whether to cater to tradition or to contemporary cultural preferences/sensibilities, and so the whole shebang ended up just little more than awkward.  The ways in which they were traditional just came off boring and unnatural rather than beautiful or reverent, and the ways that they were "modern" or "up to date" didn't go far (fur?) enough to be of any other putative benefit.  But the people were quite nice and it seems that their congregation has a nice tightly-knit subsection of folk, which is more important than mode of service.  The best feature of the service was a five-year old who played a violin solo of The First Noel (which in itself is terrific, this being January 25).  He was an adorable, well-dressed boy with eyes slightly too far apart, like a frog's.  I thought at first that if I marry it must be someone with eyes like his, because they were so attractive in their just-slight abnormality, that I thought I should love no child of mine as much as one with such eyes and such scraggly hair.  This is of course false, but I do still hold it as a genuinely recommending feature of a woman should she possess that kind of mediterranean/eastern-european/reptilian physiognomy.  However, part of me wonders if that sort of face (the frog-like face) precludes analytic capability, and this possibility fosters in me fear and doubt.

Chelsea Place, the building I originally wanted to move into.  It is simply lovely.  The brick and the black accents are so winning.  I pine, I perish.  Unfortunately somebody beat me to the punch.  The apartment I wanted was just as spacious and nice looking from within, with hardwood floors, etc., only had a nicer bathroom and a few little charming nooks and details and idiosyncrasies strewn throughout.  I just pray that whoever lives there now will love as would have I.

I saw these berry-trees while walking home, and my attention was arrested by them.  They're charming in a simple, beguiling way.  At first I didn't realize they were berries; but when I did I was chortling to myself even more audibly than before.  You have to imagine me appropriately: whenever I walk around this city I make little humming and chuckling and gasping noises of aesthetic wonder and appreciation, usually accompanied by artless verbal appraisals and acclamations, regardless of whether anybody I know or don't know is around.

THIS CHAIR IS BEAUTIFUL.  What a find.  What. A. Find.  So very happy.  Glorious chair.  The fabric of the seat is similar to felt, but it isn't felt.

Hahaha!  Think of this: imagine a chair made of felt that has never been touched by anyone.  It would the chair of unfelt felt.  I can't stop laughing.  I'm in a coffeeshop.  People are looking.

WHAT AN END-TABLE.  WONDERFUL.  I use it simply as a table right now.  Dear me, it's just so amazing.  I cannot get over it.

I love my life.

Anyway.  That's it.  That's all the recent developments by way of acquiring cumbersome possessions which will probably end up owning me more than me them.  

Hoorah for materialism (in all senses!)!

Post Post Script.

Two brief notes about the previous post and its comments. In this post, one note is about the previous post, the other is a direct reply to its comments.

1. In my post script blog I purposefully misspelled the words "whatever" and "whenever" because I thought it was funny to do so while talking about the importance of editing my blog posts for spelling errors.

2. My main purpose in splitting the one blog into two was pragmatically driven. I wanted to make it easier to read. In essence, it was a manipulative trick I chose to play on my readers. As such, I do not mind the thematic incompleteness characteristic to each post. The thematic grounds upon which I split the original blog into two was more of an added bonus that I realized once I had already decided to split the blog. Much like after believing in Christian theism on one epistemic basis, William Lane Craig found out, in the midst of doing research on Christ's resurrection for the German government, that there were good historical grounds for his belief as well.

Post Scripts.

Two quick notes on the previous two posts. That's one note per posts, but that doesn't mean that the following notes are each devoted individually to a different post. Rather, each note should be considered to be about both posts.

1. I didn't edit them at first. I usually do this compulsively wehnever I blog. For wahtever reason I was feeling fast and loose, cavalier. I didn't want to go back and read what I had written. So I left it as is. Only now, later, have I gone back and edited them for grammatical/spelling mistakes and for clarity. If you read them before but failed to enjoy them because they were sloppy, feel free to try again.

2. In response to Amy, I have to admit that originally the previous two blogs were one. They got divorced for practical reasons. I wrote it all, and though I didn't edit it afterwards, I glanced over it, and noted to myself that it was protracted. Then within my conscious experience some unsavory memories cropped up, which entailed a number of my readers having recently admitted to me that when my blogs get on the longer side, they tend to skim. Old feelings of mine rubbed their past injuries and inhaled through their teeth. So, noting that the blog at hand was already divided into two thematic parts, I decided to just chop it into half (gruesome, I know) so that more of it might end up actually being read. Why I care about it being read I don't know. Probably because for every complete sentence I write that gets read in full by another I get a free White Mocha, which I have discovered to be an incredible drink. But this does explain the Balzac book-ends; it was quite intentional.

In other news, I am gleeking on command. Louis and Lindsey are both grossed out.

Desultory thoughts on Darjeeling Limited.

Last night I watched The Darjeeling Limited on my laptop in my apartment, lying on the ground, eating raisins. There are aspects about Wes Anderson (beyond his sheer ability to make visually and aurally resplendent/absorbing sensory experiences) that I esteem but puzzle at. His characters and dialogue can be very subtle, which provide a lot of the enjoyment for me. Louis once posited to me that jokes are pleasant in part because they require the listener to make some kind of unexpected logical step, and it is this cerebral process that for some reason registers as pleasure. Anderson's subtlety demands this kind of unfacilitated ratiocination to make sense of the data presented. Usually this manifests itself in deciphering those ways in which the characters have contorted understandings of the world and each other. There are lines that evidence comically deficient/offbeat worldviews, logical quirks, or eccentric character flaws. Take some of these examples:

1. "I wonder if we could have been friends in real life; not as brothers, but as people." -Jack Darjeeling
2. (about their mother) "She's been abandoning us our entire lives. We weren't raised to be treated like that." -Francis Darjeeling
3. (a while after having thrown a belt as Francis in a rage) "I'm sorry...I wasn't aiming for your face." - Peter, Darjeeling
4. (And, a classic:) "Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is...maybe he didn't?" Eli Cash, The Royal Tenenbaums

Not only is it enjoyable to have to figure out what these things would mean on a semantic level, but this pleasure is further coupled with trying to make sense of what is meant to be communicated, why pragmatically they are saying what they are saying, and what is thereby evidenced about the character's cognitive make-up. And you have to get all this stuff almost at once, as you go along. There are usually answers to all these questions that are informed in a thorough way by the situations/characters, but little is given to the viewer by way of guidance. You have to bring your social I.Q. if you're going to enjoy it.

Furthermore, Anderson's characters just have a vernacular that is itself entertaining. Their idioms, phrases, terms: "you think it's cool to hit the sauce while you've got a bun in the oven?", "that's bull****. she's trying to sell us a vacuum cleaner.", "Let's shag ass." On and on.

Anyway, what I was getting at is that sometimes Anderson isn't subtle. And I don't know what to make of it. His lack of subtlety usually pops up when he seems to be getting a little "symbolic". It's a kind of obviousness of implicature of plot. In Darjeeling for instance, the two notorious places this happens are
(A) when Francis takes off his bandages, looks at his physical scars, and admits "I've still got some healing to do." Let me embed that word in quotation marks for you, if you don't get the hint. He's got some "healing" to do. Right.
(B) when they brothers have to ditch their beloved, dead father's "baggage" in order to make their train. "Baggage". Yeah. What to do with this? It's actually jarring for me at times. I forgive it, of course, because it's not inherently bad, it's just obvious (the opposite of what I consider one of the more estimable aspects of his characters and dialogue) and there are so many positively good things about the movie; but I still find myself wishing he had tried to veil it some more. Contrariwise, there are some things that I take to be "symbolic" that are not clear cut (Bill Murray in Darjeeling for instance).

At any rate, to finish on some kind of finishing thought: W.A. does it for me in a lot of ways. He's my favorite living creator because he gets so many things right. Many works of art please me, but only by excelling dramatically in one facet of aesthetic worthiness, whereas Anderson capitalizes well on so many of those things about storytelling and art that I esteem most. (There are, of course, nevertheless, lacunae.) It reminds me of a reflection on the nature of the quality of vocalists from Balzac's Sarrasine:

Her singing obscured the imperfect talents of the Malibrans, the Sontags, and the Fodors, in whom some one dominant quality always mars the perfection of the whole; whereas Marianina combined in equal degree purity of tone, exquisite feeling, accuracy of time and intonation, science, soul, and delicacy. She was the type of that hidden poesy, the link which connects all the arts and which always eludes those who seek it.

Loot.

I bought two pieces of furniture today at an antique store. A chair and an end table. I am yet without mattress or bed, which you may think behooves me to adjust my priorities; but here is my reasoning: if I am to enjoy the solitude afforded by my apartment I need a place to sit. I read a novella by Balzac today (Sarrasine, which was pure Balzac. Evocative description, gradually accelerating dramatic interest/tension, and rich tragedy) sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. Less than desirable. I kept slipping down to the point where everything from my neck to my heels was supine and parallel to the floor, with my head painfully crooked against the wall, perpendicular to my body. Throws off one's reading, that. I can sleep with little complaint, but I simply cannot read lying down. (cf. the first page of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler for some further discussion of reading posture; also, I just spent a good 10 minutes searching the internet for a product idea I once read about, which was publishing books with either the even or odd pages in an elongated font, so that people could read the book lying down on their side, without having to the move the book every page. I can't find it and am a full-blown pouty-lip sad because of it.)

Anyway, there were other items of furniture that I would like to buy from this antique store, when I have the money and ability to transport it, including a bedframe, desk, and dresser. This place really was the cat's pajamas. There were more things I coveted without convincing myself to buy, as well. It was a full pleasure to snoop around there.

Furniture and decor and fashion are really nice diversions for me. Design of clothes and chairs and things seems to be the intersection of art and an ingenuity keenly focused on utility. The goal of design seems to me to be to make all aspects of life beautiful, catchy, clever. Design is the industry that culminates from the desire to make life into artwork.

Discursus on Autological/Heterological words, palindromes, marginalia, Et Cetera.

what a shame that "palindrome" wasn't designed to be autological.
what a shame that the previous sentence isn't palindromic.

some nice palindrome sentences and phrases i found (simply by googling 'palindrome'):

Ah, Aristides opposed it, sir, aha!
Borrow or rob.
¡Dammit, I'm mad!
¿Did Hannah say as Hannah did?
Do geese see God?
Dr. Awkward.
¡Draw, O coward!
¿I did see referees, did I?
In a regal age ran I.
Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
Never odd or even.
Yes, Mark, cable to hotel: "Back, Ramsey!"

I feel as if Max should be good at constructing palindromes, what with habit to read things backwards.

Furthermore, I love this pen I am using, and love my marginalia. Writing onto and next to what I read enhances my understanding and retention remarkably. Which reminds me of once when I was lauded by a french professor, Madame Violette, for asking so many questions. You get if you give.

And here is a great execution of an autological ambigram, which is to say an ambigrammatic ambigram:

It only takes a moment.

Sitting here in Calypso's, a nice, chilly coffee shop, listening to Dr. Dog, a nice, catchy band, reading "Ant Fugue", a nice, magnificently orchestrated dialogue in Godel, Escher, Bach, a nice, thought-provoking book

I look up for a moment, and realize that there are somewhere around 20 grade-school children all playing various board and card games at the various tables, some with each other, some with parent-figures. I am in awe. Almost heart-wrenchingly happy, but I am not experiencing any sentimental flutterings; it is as if my analytic faculty is trying to emote itself, without help from my emotional faculty, and so the sensation is registered in its own distinct way. Like a love poem untranslated from morse code.

Speaking of love: within my field of vision there exists--you guessed it--
a beautiful barista.

I have a few browser windows open on my computer. I provide you the link's to all my open windows:
Tabs in this window:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8854810289289065476
http://www.mtnmath.com/cat.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/20/george-monbiot-recession-currencies?ref=patrick.net
Tabs in window #2:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5330337.ece
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1958/3/1958_3_34.shtml
http://www.slate.com/id/2058133/

Consider this a state of the union address, and by "union" I mean the primary facets of my personal physical situation coupled with the primary facets of all my mental states.

An Article you should feel free to read or not to read.

I like reading articles. Usually ones that don't talk about things like Gaza, Obama, NASDAQ, etc., even though that's the kind I find myself reading (or scrupulously skimming) more frequently. The reason I usually like articles, when they're good, is because they take a little interesting, clever, or snappy idea, and deliver it to you in a quick and snappy way. They're tidy. I don't go to them to be personally enriched or to encounter something beautiful or anything.

But here's a little article that I found quite nice, and more for its simplicity and beauty than for the tricky and convoluted merits I usually esteem.

Lunching on Olympus by Stephen L. Isenberg.

Let me say this about this article, though. While the sense of life that this article seems to serve, and the mentality that seems fitting given it are nice enough things, they are almost antithetical to the sort of literature and scholarship and lifestyle to which I want to aspire. I admire it in the way I might admire a woman full of feminine grace or a samurai's commitment to a samurai code: I esteem those qualities in them, but think it totally wrongheaded or indecent for me to emulate.

Living Arrangement Excitement.

Chelsea Place is a beautiful building of apartments that I fell in love with last year.
I saw a "RENT" sign on the building when I got back to Coeur d'Alene.
Excited Excited Excited.
I called. I went to see the place, and the room was very spacious and wonderful.
Decent monthly rent that includes heat.
Excited Excited Excited.
I got an application, filled it out.
Excited.
Called, asking when I should come by with the application.

Others turned in applications before me. I am in a line. A LINE.
A LINE OF PEOPLE WHO INTEND TO LIVE IN MY FUTURE APARTMENT.

Not Excited.

I am truly heartbroken. I almost feel like crying. I'm not exaggerating.

Metronomy: A Thing For Me.

Another music video. Follows the music-video trope of taking one clever gimmick and trying to exhaust its potential by making several slight variations on it throughout the video. Add cute girls to the mix and you've got a winner!


A Thing For Me from Metronomy on Vimeo.

France Gall: Laisse Tomber Les Filles

And now for some French yé-yé music.

France Gall was super cute, but she is kind of zombie-ish in this video (as in all her videos).
The lyrics talk about how boys should leave girls alone. I'm sure she provides some kind of reason, but I haven't gone through the trouble of interpreting all the words. Given her visual aides, presumably her reasons have something to do with hearts.

Also, check out that frizzy hair at 1:23!!

Some loosely tied-together thoughts, as if associated more because they sound like one another rather than for their actually being alike.

I was reading Henry James' The Ambassadors over breakfast this morning. For whatever reason I felt some onus upon me dictating that I read it as soon as possible, so I didn't wait for the kettle to whistle wildly before insisting that it metamorphose into coffee. Hence, throughout my reading of Book First, my coffee devolved from luke warm to cool, and eventually to a depressing, granular chill. Ever since I've started using a french press (i.e., that interval of time that solely constitutes my entire coffee-drinking career), the dregs of coffee have incited in me indelible evocations of powder-based hot chocolate gone cold.

Anyway. Was reading The Ambassadors, enjoying the styling of James' prose as if the mode of discourse were some kind of riddle that demands an application of focus, creativity, logic, and grammatical prowess. You solve the riddle if you figure out what the hell is going on. Super fun. Anyway: the question dawned: ARE HENRY JAMES AND WILLIAM JAMES RELATED?

What did their parents feed them.

Here's a little excerpt from a letter from William to his younger brother James:

"Why won't you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds. Seriously, I wish you would, for you can; and I should think it would tempt you, to embark on a 'fourth manner.'"

William James is a famous pragmatist philosopher who argued, among other things, "Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons." This, I find, is a delightful view (which may or may not mean that I should accept it as true, or that I already do) that provides a foundation upon which much conceptual play may freely foment. (Incidentally, however, what James means by "good in the way of belief" is subtle and technical. I've read a number of pragmatists who insist that their view isn't simply something like "truth is what works". What it is supposed to be I cannot easily say.)

Consider, for instance, this fun article by atheist Matthew Parris, which argues that Christianity, though false, is the best thing for Africa--for "pragmatic" reasons. (Note that Parris is not a pragmatist like James. I'm purposefully and sloppily equivocating over the word "pragmatic".) His argument, boiled down in his last sentence, is that, without Christianity, Africa is "at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete." How interesting! It just makes me giggle and squirm with glee when people engineer personal beliefs or cultural mores, using whole worldviews as material. "Yeah, your society's a bit congested and inflamed: take some hedonism with a glass of water and call me in the morning." "Yeah, your psyche seems to be dieseling, overheating, and suffering from brake pedal pulsation. I think it's an electrical short: slap a coherentist theory of justification on there and switch out the mercantilism for anarcho-capitalism and she'll run just fine."

The stock Christian response to someone like Parris is, "Yeah, Christianity does make people happy and content, and it does solve social problems. It's true. Good talk."

All of which reminds me of the short story Reginald at the Theatre by Saki, of which I provide you with a taste:

"The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical standard which circumstances demanded.
'Of course,' she resume combatively, 'it's the prevailing fashion to believe in perpetual change and mutability, and all that sort of thing, and to say we are all merely an improved form of primeval ape--of course you subscribe to that doctrine?'
'I think it decidedly premature; in most people I know the process is far from complete.'
'And equally of course you are quite irreligious?
'Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with modern conveniences of the other.'
The Duchess suppressed a sniff. She was one of those people who regard the Church of England with patronizing affection, as if it were something that had grown up in their kitchen garden."

It goes on much in the same vein.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that most people operated just on these sorts of lines. People are always talking about beliefs forming behavior, but I find myself inclined bashfully to raise a question. The question I find myself inclined to raise has something to do with the tendency towards a confusion between horses and carts.

Here endeth the ramble.

Having found the following picture justifies my idle, trifling ways. Or: You're Welcome, Max.

Just doing my thing. Screwing around. FOR TWO+ MONTHS.
I have never had such a lengthy stretch of delinquency in my life.
The name of the game is "Shirk Work". Catchy game name, I know. The rules are actually pretty complicated.

But, nevertheless, I find ways of justifying my behavior to myself under the auspices of any and all of the principles, arguments, "isms", etc., in my ideological bag of tricks. I'm like an ethical and methodological circus: whatever amazing or bizarre act will wow the audience of my conscience, convictions, and willpower into forgetting that my logic grading must somehow someway someday be finished and completed is hurriedly rushed into the ring.

I am reminded of a couple quotations, one from Benjamin Franklin, the other from a philosophy of language lecturer I had a kind of crush on at Oxford:

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." - B. Franklin, Autobiography

[in reference to some philosophical position that he found bankrupt yet technically defendable] "There are always moves you can make." - Philosophy of Language lecturer.

Anyway. In screwing around/doing my thing around the Internet, I found this picture of Max's future wife:

This post is basically a little political tab for any friends I have who read my blog but are politically ignorant and/or literally blind.

Way to go, Obama-mama.

Obama, apart from his statism, is probably sounding at least a little appealing to Libertarians and certain Republican sub-sects (such as the Republican Liberty Caucus). He's proposing (and not just from a stump, but from within a room--presumably a room with a door, a table, chairs, and other politicians who are haggling about how to actually do such a thing) to cut $300 billion in taxes.

Oh yeah, and he wants to pull out of the war. So there's that, too. Libertarians make mean faces at war.

Now, of course, this is nothing compared to the bottom line of McCain's tax cuts. It's not that Obama's tax cuts are remarkable and make me want to pee they're so good...it's that they exist at all which is neat. I mean, Obama is a democrat. Democrats aren't supposed to cut taxes; they're supposed to sell golden Senate seats and stuff. That's why it's kind of a nice surprise. Kind of like meeting an attractive female who also is intelligent.

(For my politically ignorant friends, the golden Senate seat thing in the previous paragraph is a low-blow, asinine joke about this unfortunate D.B.)

Also, I've read a few break-downs of each 2008 candidate's tax proposals, and though Montgomery College (M.C. = McCain. Get with it. I'm funny: I make stupid jokes about people's names) cuts more, he cuts it mostly from the $160K family income and upwards (while Obama actually starts increasing taxes for family incomes over $600K), whereas Obama ends up cutting more taxes for family incomes between $0-60K. This means that anyone reading my blog has benefitted personally in a financial way from Obama more-so than they would from M.C.Escher (another M.C. joke).

Now. Here's a reason to think that while, even though my father will pay less in taxes, (which is cool, sure,) the Obama way of cutting things up actually stands to do more harm than good. And, again, this is my politically dwarfed understanding spinning this. The big money-making businesses that Obama will cut up to shreds (which McDonalds would have actually helped) are the people who make jobs. I'm not saying that Obama is going to ruin the economy (though I wouldn't be able to predict that sort of thing coming unless I were a prophet inspired by God. No fiscal seer is Jonathan Charles Wright.) but I blench a little at upping the taxes from 8-11.5% for most of the country's entrepreneurial investors and business owners. My guess is that when you cut from the top, it makes the desire to succeed in business (with or without really trying, whatever) less desirable. I wish I were more economically savvy and could draw up a spreadsheet detailing the cost-benefits analysis of some company, who figures out, because of their weird tax position, that it's in their best interest to suck a little (or a lot) and hence to start laying off employees, etc. There's got to be some situation in which the numbers turn out that way. Maybe there are several.

So, if your goal is to stick it to Uncle Sam and keep as much dough as you can, you might like Obama for the figure he cuts out of the U.S. (To be quite honest, I make so little that I am unaffected in either case. I have never not had my income tax payment returned to me in full. THANK YOU, SPAGHETTI FACTORY!) But if you're big schtick is about the country and it's GDP, job rate, whatever, etc....eh, I wonder. I don't know; but I have warm fuzzy feelings vaguely formed by political principles that make me wonder.

2009 Resolution.

In 2007, Jonathan Charles Wright's Blog managed to produce 67 blog posts.
In 2008, Jonathan Charles Wright's Blog managed to produce 154 blog posts.
This is an increase in productivity of roughly 230%
If Jonathan Charles Wright's Blog continues to grow along these lines, in 2009 it will produce roughly 354 blog posts.
This is roughly 1 blog posts every 1.03 days.

Accordingly, I, Jonathan Charles Wright, make the following New Years commitments to you, my readership:

1. On this blog I will do always and only whatever the hell I want to do.
2. As long as it does not conflict with #1, I will post 1 blog every 1.03 days.
3. As long as it does not conflict with #1, The Runes of Chaos will be completed.